Post-Vacation Catch-up Links

Monday, December 1st, 2008 at
12:10 pm

During my Thanksgiving vacation, I didn’t do any blogging but I did still read the news. I’ll have long posts about some of the items later on, but just wanted to do a quick hit of some bits I found interesting:

* Tying up some loose ends, the state agency director that pried into Joe "the plumber" Wurzelbacher’s confidential information will be punished, if by "punished" you mean "one month unpaid leave". I think that qualifies more for "lightly tapped on the wrist".

* The singles dating service eHarmony had chosen not to match same-sex couples. The reason shouldn’t matter, as its a private business, but psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who started the site, had done his personality studies on heterosexual couples and didn’t think that, scientifically, he could extrapolate his findings to homosexual couples. Disagree if you want, but it was his business and he can run it the way he wants to.

Well, perhaps not. eHarmony has just caved to a lawsuit by a gay man, and now has a new site for same-sex matches. Coming next; meat-eaters suing vegetarian restaurants. So much for "tolerance".

* Archaeologists have found new evidence that they have indeed found King Herod’s tomb.

* Academia’s assault on Thanksgiving is descending into self-parody, where a pair of public schools decided to stop a long-standing tradition of having kids from one school dress up as pilgrims and the other as American Indians and come together for Thanksgiving. When opponents of this celebration of a very bright spot in our nation’s history protest it with signs saying "Don’t Celebrate Genocide", you know that either they are just full of anger or are simply products of the public education system. Or both.

* Academia’s assault on Christmas is descending into self-parody (sensing a trend here?) with one school banning, not just Jesus, but even Santa. When Jews and Wiccans are standing up for Christmas, you know you are light-years over the line.

* Salvation Army bell-ringers considered noise pollution? Now, while I rang those bells as a kid growing up, and even in college, I just gotta’ say that this is serious over-sensitivity. Bell ringers have been at malls for decades; it’s not all that loud. If the bell-ringer can handle the "noise", the kiosk merchants should be able to. And let’s not forget that the Christmas song "Silver Bells" was inspired by those bell-ringers.